Welcome, Fox Spirit

We have a new publisher to welcome to the bookstore today. Fox Spirit Books is headed by Adele Wearing, who is well known in the UK SpecFic scene, and hopefully internationally thanks to the fabulous Girl’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse blog. Their first book is published today, and I’m delighted to see that it is by a South African writer. Check out Requiem in E Sharp here, and listen to an interview with the author, Joan De La Haye, here. Our very best wishes to Fox Spirit and all who write for them.

A Sunburst Nominee #IBW12

The last of my posts for Independent Booksellers Week takes us to Canada. The short lists for this year’s Sunburst Awards were announced recently. Our friends at ChiZine Publications have three novels in the running for the adult category. Sadly two of them are part of the exclusive distribution deal that I blogged about last month. Enter, Night by Michael Rowe and The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet should be back on sale soon, but in the meantime you can buy Eutopia by David Nickle. The Sunburst jury said:

“A harrowing story of eugenics, religious fanaticism, and the cruelties underlying dreams of utopia, Eutopia interweaves narrative threads to create a nightmare-inducing chronicle of humanity’s fearsome quest for perfection at any cost. The novel is set in 1911, in the small utopian community of Eliada, Idaho, where different kinds of monsters walk in the day as well as prowl the night, and where two complicated strangers come to discover just how terrible the marriage of prejudiced science and religion can be. The prose is spare but evocative, and the methodical and tightly crafted narrative creeps forward with cruel, inevitable certainty, offering up human and inhuman horrors alike that respect the readers’ intelligence while inducing visceral disgust and dread.”

Food For Thought #IBW12

I’ve been busily adding Aqueduct Press books to the store, and here are a few pieces on non-fiction that I’d like to draw your attention to.

Imagination/Space is a collection of essays and talks from Gwyneth Jones. The topics include Fiction, Feminism, Technology and Politics. Needless to say, Gwyneth is very sharp on all of those issues. The book has enthusiastic reviews from Gary K. Wolfe and Farah Mendlesohn. I don’t need to add to that.

Next up is The Secret Feminist Cabal, Helen Merrick’s cultural history of feminist science fiction. The book was a Hugo nominee, won a Ditmar, and was on the Tiptree honor list. It is a must read book for anyone interested in the intersections of feminism, science fiction and fandom.

We Wuz Pushed is a shorter work in the Conversation Pieces series of chapbooks. Written by Brit Mandelo, it is based on her PhD thesis and is an extensive study of the work of Joanna Russ.

Finally there’s another Conversation Pieces book, Writing the Other. Written by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, it is a guide for authors wishing to write books containing characters from outside of their own culture.

These are all great (and in some cases famous) books. I’m delighted to have them in stock.

Aqueduct Flows #IBW12

Outside we’ve been deluged with water. Inside I have been deluged with books from Aqueduct Press. I have been busy adding them to the shop. There will be a lot more going live over the next few days, but for now I want to highlight just one. I am delighted to be able to offer for sale the winner of the 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Award; Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. Just click through and read some of the reviews, OK?

Book Review – Leviathan Wakes

Slowly but surely I am getting my Hugo reading done. The has put me in a position to offer my thoughts on Leviathan Wakes, which I am pleased to discover is a much more complex book than I had been led to believe. Were I a betting person I would not put any money on it, but at the same time I am glad I read it and will be buying book 2 in the series. You can read my review here.

News from Cheeky Frawg – Karin Tidbeck Collection

Over at Jeff VanderMeer’s blog there is some good news about a forthcoming Cheeky Frawg publication, Jagannath, a collection of stories by Swedish writer, Karin Tidbeck. Given that the book is being blurbed by Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville, Karen Joy Fowler and Karen Lord, you don’t need me to tell you that it will be good. And indeed I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. But I was on a panel or two with Karin at Ã…con and I can assure you that she is a very smart lady. I suspect that Sweden is about to make a splash in the literary world for something other than noir (though I can’t promise an absence of dead things).

New From Twelfth Planet: Showtime #IBW12

One of the great things about independent booksellers is that they are often big supporters of independent presses. In that spirit, I’m delighted to be able to bring you the latest release from a top Australian publisher. Showtime by Narrelle M. Harris is the latest in the Twelve Planets series of short collections by Australian women writers. This one is about families; horrible families. Or perhaps more accurately, families of horrors. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I can’t help but warm to a book that contains a story called “The truth about Brains” which begins as follows:

My little brother Dylan is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from being a pest. He still follows me everywhere, and Mum still makes me take him with me when I go to the shops.

Unsurprisingly, the introduction is by Seanan McGuire. You can find out more about the book (and buy it) here.

Independent Booksellers Week #IBW12

This appears to be only a UK thing, but hopefully it can be a good excuse for the rest of the world to be kind to independent booksellers too. There’s a whole lot more about the event at its official website, and if you are UK-based you should go there to find out more about independent bookstores in your area.

For my own part I’d like to recommend Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights and Toppings, both in Bath (Toppings is also in Ely). They are generalist bookstores and so don’t sell a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy, but they are staffed by people who love books and who are happy to recommend good writing no matter what the subject matter. They also do great events. A shout out too for Hydra Books in Bristol who have lots of interesting political books, and are very happy to stock LGBT-themed work. Forbidden Planet in Bristol are lovely people too, though I’m not sure how small you have to be to qualify as independent.

While this is theoretically a UK event, I can’t let such a thing go by without a mention of Borderlands Books in San Francisco, which is everything you could want in an science fiction and fantasy specialist. The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley is great too. I understand they’ve been going through some rough times of late, but I think they are open again now. And then there’s Dark Carnival, also in Berkeley, which in all my years of living in the Bay Area I never managed to visit.

Yes, there are three specialist SF&F bookstores in the Bay Area. Is it any wonder I miss the place so much?

Finally, of course, I have my own bookstore. I suspect that some of the supporters of Independent Booksellers Week will see me as part of the Evil Empire. A lot of the publicity I’m seeing for the event talks about shopping locally. But it simply isn’t practical for every small town to have an independent bookstore, and anyway most of what I sell is only available through SF&F specialists, so I think I count. More to the point, I’ve been deluged with new books in the past few days and I’m going to take IBW as an excuse to talk about them a lot.

Yesterday we had the July editions of Clarkesworld and Lightspeed added to the store. I wrote about them here. I’m also finishing up adding a pile of new books from Book View Cafe. The latest additions have been works by Jeffrey A. Carver. They are hard-ish SF, and probably the most interesting title is Eternity’s End, which was a Nebula nominee.

New From Book View Cafe

Those of you who follow the Wizard’s Tower Twitter feed will have seen me add a whole lot of books from Book View Cafe recently. We have, for example, all five volumes of Irene Radford’s “Merlin’s Descendents” series. Probably the most famous books, however, are the first two volumes of Judith Tarr’s “Hound and Falcon” series: The Isle of Glass and The Golden Horn. I’m assuming that The Hounds of God will appear in due course. In the meantime, here’s some fine reading.

The Return of The Troika

Back in 1997 the vast VanderMeer empire that we know today was a mere collection of spores seeking to insinuate their way into the fabric of the SF&F community. Even then, however, it was exuding weirdness from every mycelium. One of the most glorious efflorescences of the Ministry of Whimsy Press was a surrealist novel called The Troika. Written by Stepan Chapman, it won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998 and is one of the few winners of that prize that is more weird than anything written by Dick himself. It is one of the books that I choose to review in Emerald City #100.

The book is long out of print, and a new copy will set you back over $100. However, Jeff’s new ebook company, Cheeky Frawg, has just brought out an electronic edition. And yes, I have it in the store.

Update: Neil Clarke informs me that, while the book is published in conjunction with Cheeky Frawg, it is still a Ministry of Whimsy title, and these days the Ministry is an imprint of Wyrm Publishing. It is a complicated business, publishing, even at the small press level.

Beneath the glare of three purple suns, three travelers – an old Mexican woman, an automated jeep, and a brontosaurus – have trudged across a desert for hundreds of years. They do not know if the desert has an end, and if it does, what they might find there. Sometimes they come across perfectly-preserved cities, but without a single inhabitant, and never a drop of rain. Worse still, they have no memory of their lives before the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities.

The Troika. There’s nothing else like it.

Book Review – The Whispering Muse

This is the book by the Icelandic writer that I told you about last week. My review talks about Nazis and a trans person, but The Whispering Muse is probably not the sort of book you’d imagine from that brief description. As you can hopefully make out from the cover image, it has an enthusiastic recommendation from David Mitchell. That gives you a much better idea of what to expect. Read more here.

Forthcoming Books

I’ve just sent out a press release announcing that Wizard’s Tower will be producing ebook editions of Juliet McKenna’s Tales of Einarinn series. That’s five books, which will double our output.

We don’t have publication dates yet as the process of turning paper books into ebooks is (as Juliet has explained) quite complicated, but I’ll keep you informed as the process goes forward.

Book Review – The Mirage

There has been a lot of discussion online about the use of the Dos Passos technique by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel, 2312. Stan, however, is not the only person who has done this. Another very successful recent example is The Mirage by Matt Ruff. While 2312 is set in the future and needs big infodumps to explain how that world works, The Mirage is an alternate history that needs to explain how its world differs from our own. It is a 9/11 story, and in many ways the world of the book is a mirror image of ours. If you’d like to know more, read the review.

Grand Pride Month Sale

At this time of cities all around the world are running LGBT Pride events. San Francisco gets in on the action on June 23-24; London’s big day is July 7th; and there’s actually a thing called World Pride Month that this year is running from June 17th to July 8th.

In recognition of all this, Lethe Press are having a grand sale of all of their titles available through my ebook store. And I have persuaded Steve Berman to let it run a little long so that we can finish on Bristol Pride day, July 14th. The sale prices went up yesterday, and you can see all of the books and magazines on sale here. Everything is at least 33% off. A few titles are even cheaper as they were already on sale.

Here are some of the very fine books that you can pick up cheaply:

Locus Awards

The Locus Awards were announced in Seattle yesterday. China Miéville and George R.R. Martin took home the Science Fiction Novel and Fantasy Novel prizes (with Embassytown and A Dance With Dragons), which sets up a titanic battle for the Hugo. Erin Morgenstern won the First Novel prize with The Night Circus. But the big winner of the night was Cat Valente who took home the prizes for YA Novel (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making), Novella (Silently and Very Fast) and Novelette (White Lines on a Green Field). A clean sweep of all of the short fiction categories was prevented only by the presence of Neil Gaiman on the Short Story ballot. The full results are available here.

This is, of course, a good excuse to remind you that you can buy Silently and Very Fast from my ebook store.

Gender in 2312

Bloggage has been limited this week, partly due to my going to London, but mainly because I have been deluged with paying work. This is a good thing.

However, just to show you all I haven’t forgotten about this blog, here’s a quick post.

Those of you who follow my blog for gender-related posts may not always pick up on the book reviews, especially when they appear to be about hard SF books. Well, I’ve just submitted a recommendation for Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 to the Tiptree jury because of its portrayal of a post-binary-gender world. If you want to know more, go read the review.

Book Review – 2312

Having taking the opportunity to talk to Kim Stanley Robinson at length about the book while he was in Bath, I’ve now been able to finish my review of 2312. It is well over 3000 words, which is around three times the length of the reviews I write these days. That alone should give you some idea of how fascinating the book is. There are, inevitably, things about the book that I take issue with. You can’t throw out that many ideas and still keep everyone on your side. But, as Caitlín Kiernan said on Twitter yesterday, “Art is not perfection, it’s failing with grace.” I get the impression that Stan would agree with that, and that he’d welcome intelligent discussion of the various issues he has tackled. Hopefully I’ve managed a little bit of that.

New Book Reminder

A fair few UK readers very wisely fled the country over Jubilee week. And quite rightly too given the awful weather we had. But if you were on a beach somewhere last week you may have missed the announcement of a new book from Wizard’s Tower. It is Turns & Chances, a stand-alone novella from Juliet E. McKenna. The book was originally a limited edition offering from PS Publishing, and the paper version is now out of print, so this is something that many of Juliet’s fans will not have. You can find out more about it in the bookstore.

Book Review – Ishtar

Sometimes it doesn’t surprise me that Australian women Dominate(TM) their local publishing industry. They have such wicked minds, and write such disturbing stories. A case in point is Ishtar, a collection of three novellas from Kaaron Warren, Deb Biancotti and Cat Sparks. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and Deb’s story is a nominee for this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards. You can read my review here.

New Book – Turns and Chances

I am delighted to announce that the latest book from Wizard’s Tower Press is now available for purchase. As I mentioned last week, Turns and Chances is a stand-alone novella set in Juliet McKenna’s world of Einarinn. It introduces us to the country of Lescar, which became the setting for the Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution series. Juliet talks about the book here. You can buy it in our bookstore now. It will become available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo over the next few days.